1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a disc cartridge housing a disc, and specifically relates to a disc cartridge housing a disc without using a disc tray, and also performing insertion/ejection of the disc by upper and lower shells being separated without providing an opening portion used for insertion/ejection of the disc within a cartridge body.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the recording capacity of disc-shaped recording media has exponentially increased, and is coming to be sufficient for storing information of an amount handled on a personal level. On the other hand, when applying an ultra-multi-layer disc or volume recording disc of which the practical realization in the future is expected, to a cloud computing data center, or a system used for large-capacity-data recording and storage, in the event that the disc is housed in a cartridge one at a time such with as a Blu-ray Disc (BD) or Professional disc, recording capacity for one cartridge will not be sufficient in the future.
Also, attempting to construct a data center using a disc loader machine or cart machine which handles a great number of disc cartridges housing a large capacity disc one at a time has been insufficient in improving the utilization efficiency of space.
As a solution, a configuration in which a great number of sheet-shaped discs are stored in one cartridge has been proposed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-134019, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2007-115328, and Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2007-172726. However, such a configuration has to provide the same number of dedicated disc trays as the number of discs that can be stored, and the cartridge body thereof causes increase in size, and increase in weight. Also, a disc drive device side for driving this disc has to provide a mechanism for transporting a disc tray, and also ejecting a disc alone from the disc tray, or the like, which causes the disc loading mechanism to be complicated and increased in size. Also, this also causes a problem such as increase in size and increase in cost of the device body, such as a mechanism for stabilizing rotation of a sheet-shaped disc being necessary, and so forth.
On the other hand, when attempting to house a great number of disc-shaped recording media without employing disc trays, oscillation of disc-shaped recording media within a cartridge body may cause unpredicted trouble at the time of insertion/ejection of discs. Also, insufficient strength of the cartridge body may cause deformation of the disc cartridge, or damage of housed disc-shaped recording media. Further, necessity for preventing dust and so forth from entering the inside of the cartridge body has increased along with increase in the recording capacity of discs, so there has been demand for a mechanism in which an opening portion for insertion/ejection of a disc is not readily opened, which causes complexity and increase in size of the cartridge body.